Exploring the "magic" of technological potential and its impact on our human experience.

Monthly Archives: April 2013

For most of our species’ existence, as individuals, we did have ready access to mirrors (and hence, reflections). Our only source of ever seeing ourselves would be on the surface of water or in the reflection of another person’s eye. Seeing yourself reflected in the eyes of other people lent significant value to those interactions (on a psychological level).

Now, we do have access to mirrors, but beyond that, our focus is essentially on an electronic screen. Appropriately, our reflections are lost whenever these devices are on (as is our ability to self-reflect). We become caught in our creations.

We are faced, occasionally, with the task of defining our philosophy of technology in education. For myself, I believe that we have reached the technological capacity of being able to convey any imaginable thought or feeling in some fashion, giving us a level of communicative capability that we have never before reached. Communication and creativity are the driving forces of human success, and they will continue to propel us into the futures we wish to experience, especially aided by technology that is becoming reality shortly after its original imagining.

Speaking broadly, if we teach ourselves and our children to be receptive to the changing nature of technology (instead focusing on honing our adaptive technical abilities over our concrete technical ones), we will achieve the greatest advantage our species offers. Being afixed to outdated, slower formats is being afixed to outdated and slower methods of expressing thought.

The important thing to keep in mind is that we must teach this philosophy. We must work to remember that there is no certainty we should assume in the limits of technological capacity. Each child should be taught that their computer is a tool to help them understand, not a source of simplistic answers that will help them fill in their homework. We should shift our methods of teaching to critical interpretation of information, now that information retention is no longer as significant (as information is now retained on the web).